Biographical Archive

Harvey H. Nininger
1887-1986
Kansas - Colorado - Arizona, USA

Notice: the following text is based on Nininger's autobiography Find a Falling Star [1972], except where referenced otherwise.

Formerly a biology professor in Kansas, Harvey Harlow Nininger (1887–1986) became a self-taught meteoriticist after witnessing 'a blazing stream of fire' in the sky in a winter evening of 1923. This experience changed Nininger's life and the future of the then minor field of Meteoritics.

In 1930, Nininger moved to Denver at the Colorado Museum of Natural History. In 1933, he published his first book, A Stone-Pelted Planet. With his wife, they established The Nininger Laboratory, renamed The American Meteorite Laboratory in 1937. Nininger then founded the American Meteorite Museum (1942–1960), which was the first museum in the world dedicated to rocks from space and housed the largest private collection of meteorites of that day. In 1958, about 20% of the Nininger collection was sold to the British Museum and the remaining 80% to the Arizona State University in 1960. In the last years, Nininger's son-in-law Glenn Huss (TBD-1991) and his wife Margaret (1925-2007) operated the museum.

Meteorites from the Nininger Collection can be identified by an inventory number composed of two numbers separated by a dot, the first number being the location index and the second one the specimen number. The match between IDs and specimens is given in the Nininger collection catalogue [Nininger, 1950] as well as in the ASU meteorite collection catalogues up to ID 684 [e.g., Lewis et al., 1985].

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